We Hate Zombies

Scenario:
Like a badass, you have a game room in your basement oddly situated next to a bunch of tools across the room, including a crowbar, hacksaw, and some battery powered shit. Maybe you have a garage in your basement, maybe your wife just hates your things and wants it trapped in the downstairs, whatever. Also, you have a computer down there too, which you only ever use just for watching pr0n while you play a game of pool. Which is what you’re doing.

But then something in the back of your mind triggers a heightened sense of awareness, and you begin to hear the sounds of distant screaming. Oh baby, this is what you’ve always dreamt of, time for some action! Except you can hear they’re already in your house. And they’re already infecting your wife. Holy shit! They’re already coming down into your man cave and are between you and all your possible weapons! What do you do?

What you should do:
Pull your pants up and fasten your safety belt, cause it’s time to rock! As a reminder to everyone who doesn’t remember every word that I’ve ever preached, there’s no such thing as being separated from all possible weapons. As soon as you stand up, you should immediately become aware that all your junk no longer has meaning beyond what damage it can inflict on an infected rotten turd muncher.

At your desk, you understand the world is over and that the computer will soon lose power forever. First weapon: the computer. Without a computer, the desk is nothing. Second weapon: the desk. Then you realize you don’t have time to sit down anymore. Third weapon: the chair. And you never really played pool anyway cause you suck really bad at it. Fourth weapon: pool sticks, the cue ball, America.

Without knowing the meaning of fear, you should smash that sticky keyboard into the teeth of the first blood-thirsty zombie, knocking him backward onto his ass. Then throw the chair across the room and trip up the three zombies still coming down the stairs. The pool balls are worthless to you, but grab two pool sticks and overturn the table onto the toothless downed dead bastard still struggling to get up.

Two wooden spears in hand, all that’s left is to dance a dance of everlasting death, spearing the lifeless eyes of those cursed fuckers until you reach your wall o’ tools. I won’t even list the different weapons you’ve suddenly found for yourself, but I think you won’t have any trouble cleaning up this mess and getting the hell out of Dodge.

What I would do:
No ex-Major League pitcher turned nine ball pro would be able to resist spinning onto the pool table and beaming zombies straight in the face with a rack of balls…which is exactly what I would do. For a little bit anyway, because it would be fun, like Shaun of the Dead throwing records at zombies kind of fun. I guess what I’m trying to say is Family Fun. Unlike what was on the computer.

After having my bit of fun, the rage would inevitably settle back in, and there would be nothing left to hold back my wrath. Any zombie still standing would immediately get a face full of CRT monitor, followed by a desk full-body-slamming. Keep in mind that none of these things are likely to put a zombie down for the count, at least not like poking them through the eye with a wooden stake, but it helps me control my penchant for burning fury — by adding gas to the flames.

Immediately I would begin dismantling my stairs one board at a time, taking each one and beating the moving corpses until it splintered into fragments and the sons of dead, motherless goats really stopped moving for good. The blood and gore would be epic and fascinating, the kind of phenomenon mathematicians might someday study for fractal splatter analysis.

I would probably need to take a shower, then run to the nearest Taco Bell and see if they had been overrun yet. Booyah! Say hello to my Burrito baby.

Thanks to Tyler for submitting this scenario.

Scenario:
It is late summer. The air is stagnate and boiling hot. Your field hasn’t seen a drop of rain in about a month. The corn is underdeveloped but completely dried out and ready to harvest. You are out in the field taking samples to make sure it isn’t too soon, or too late. You are about to take a break and smoke your tobacco pipe when you hear a faint rustling in the corn a few rows over. What could it be? Your wife died last year from the cancer and Ruddy, your brown lab, died ten years ago when he got kicked by the horse. The kids have all moved out and you don’t have any friends. It can be only one thing. Zombies! What do you do?

What you should do:
You’ve been farming this land your whole life so you know where you are and where you can run, but the zombies have the advantage. They just have to follow you and you don’t know where they could be hiding. You can’t see far in the corn across the rows, so you need to run down the row that you are in. You can see all the way up and down the row so you only have to worry about a zombie flanking you on your way out.

But which way do you go? Do you head back to the house where the zombies could find other people to attack or do you head farther out into the fields? Heading home would give you more tools to dispatch the zombies, so you should head that way, despite the danger to other people. Remember, you don’t have any friends, so if they get bite, just finish them off with your chainsaw.

Once you make it out of the corn, grab your rifle and pick them off as they saunter out of the fields. Hopefully you get them all, but you’ll never know.

What I would do:
Above all else, I am a zombie hunter. I am not a farmer, a brother, or a human. Keeping that in mind, I want to make sure that I get every last one of those bastards. Making the assumption that the zombies are all in the corn field, I only have one option. Light a match and watch the mother fucker burn.

But how do I make sure that I get them all and that they don’t escape the flames by going the opposite way? Well, it is simple. I have to start the flames toward one of the corners of the field that I am in. Since the zombies are likely to blindly follow me around until they catch me or they die, I will stay in the field and continue to light the corn in various places. The eventual goal is to spiral toward the center of the field so that they corn is burning in all directions and the zombies are trapped. Since the corn is dry as week old dog shit, it should burn pretty damn fast. Then all I have to do is sit and wait.

Why kill yourself brave zombie hunter? Considering that I am an old man with nobody to spend my life with and I just burned my entire years work (and paycheck), it really does seem like the easy way out. And, if I get all of the zombies in one shot, what better way to go down? I could live out the rest of my life and eventually die of liver failure, on account of the drinking, or I could sit in the middle of a burning cornfield, all zenlike and shit, while a horde of zombies closes in on me just as the fire closes in on them. It is like choosing between a bratwurst and cow penis: the choice is clear.

Title: Zombie Tower Defense (click to play)
Style: Top-Down Strategy
Source: ZombieHead.org

Considering everything, I thought today would be a good day to review a game that could get your juices flowing. Mind juices, that is. A little bit of a strategy game is what I’m saying, so that makes today Strategy Friday. (For all readers from the Future, today is Friday. If you don’t agree because of your time warps, you can go f#!@ your self.)

So what does the Strategy Friday Stork bring to our door step? Zombie. Tower. Defense. … ! Like the build up there? Good, because that’s the most excitement you’ll get out of the game.

Zombie Tower Defense is your typical tower defense game. You just shoot at zombies, and by you, I mean your towers, strategically placed and upgraded. There are some different types of zombies and blah blah, but really it’s just the run-of-the-mill tower defense game. There isn’t a whole lot of special stuff going on, as in none. You could be shooting at anything, anything at all. Babies, Marshmellow men, boxes of crackerjacks. Anything, and this game would still be the same.

Which, fortunately, is alright, because all tower defense games are fun as long as you feel like you’re winning. Unfortunately, this game doesn’t really bring with it the whole satisfaction of annihilating zombies thing, so it loses points there. Oh well, at least it doesn’t crash my computer.

Game Score:

Graphics:		2.0
Sound:		?
Fun Factor:		2.0
Satisfaction:		1.0
Total:

Title: Zed Town (click to play)
Style: Top-Down Shooter
Source: http://npgam.es/

In ZedTown, or Zed Town, or whatever, you get to play a guy with a gun. This is actually not unusual for zombie games; in fact, it’s pretty standard. As this standard guy, you move around some maps and shoot zombies in the dark because you’re apparently a vampire and can’t hunt zombies at sun-up. Or there are no windows in this town, I don’t know, but every map requires a flashlight and is dark as hell.

As this quite standard guy running around dark standard houses in Zed Town, you’re task is to clear the building/town of zombies and otherwise rock out. I don’t know why you would want to cleanse a village with no other survivors, so the whole premise is kind of dumb to me. Why not go find some other survivors, then clear a town? Why take the risks on yourself? Why be so standard? And dark? And alone?

And hopeless?

Shooting zombies is good fun, I suppose, but every zombie game has some good-fun-shooting-zombies thing going for it. And, at that, there are only a small selection of guns that aren’t terribly exciting. Standard, really, except reloading some of them requires reloading one bullet at a time. Kind of a pain, actually.

Unfortunately, I kind of hated this game because I couldn’t have any fun running around in the dark with a flashlight. Maybe if I was playing at night it would be a different story. Maybe if I had the sound on I would have been able to hear the direction of the zombies without having to see them. But I doubt it. No, I think this game is just a good try at making a better game, and if killing zombies is the most enjoyable thing your game has to offer, why make it so hard to do? If realism was the goal, who would realistically choose to fight in the dark?

And what the hell is with that white box on the left side? Could the contrast be any more painful to stare at?

The only thing I did like was that each building had a little sub-story blurb you could read before jumping into it. This didn’t really help set the mood or anything, but it was kind of fun to see other people write about zombies. And the end of the world. Like me.

Game Score:

Graphics:		1.0
Sound:		?
Fun Factor:		1.5
Satisfaction:		1.5
Total:

Title: Zombie Mayhem (click to play)
Style: Side-View Shooter
Source: Sun-Studios.net

This zombie game is a little different than most. First, you play a kid with a bow and arrow as the only weapon, and some sadistic fuck has tied up all your friends in a field, right on the other side of a zombie spawning pool.

If you wait too long to shoot, the zombies will jump on you like a fat kid on a box of tootsie-rolls, but if you shoot too much you’ll inevitably spear the friends whose very lives you would die trying to protect. When you do, the guilt and remorse is so stunning that you choose to forsake the rest of your friends and let the zombies rip into your stack of flapjacks. That’s the sad ending and the struggle of your existence. In this game, but also in real life.

While the game is simple, without the flair of weapons or struggle against various indestructible foes, it’s simplicity is what makes it so damn addictive. You can jump into a game, and after killing a few kids you end up getting the hang of it no problem. Then it’s not about the skills of using weapons and running around, but just a simple test of speed and exactness. Like zombie tetris, and I get a god damn tetris every time.

I thought this game was awesome and almost lost my job over it. I almost wet my pants because I couldn’t stop playing to go to the bathroom, and then I almost wet my pants because I was so excited. Do I think shooting a zombie with a bow and arrow is a good idea? No, hell no, but this game makes it fun and enjoyable, so who fudging cares.

If you don’t like, I hope you get tied up to a post on the other side of a zombie spawning pool.

Game Score:

Graphics:		3.0
Sound:		?
Fun Factor:		4.5
Satisfaction:		4
Total: